mardi 15 avril 2008

A stringent attack on the IMF World Bank and all its reeking operatives here. The target this time is the way these abatoir assistants deal with the starvation that looms for millions across the globe. One point, "The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Jean Ziegler offered among the bleakest prognoses for the continuing crisis. “We are heading for a very long period of rioting, conflicts (and) waves of uncontrollable regional instability marked by the despair of the most vulnerable populations,” he told the French daily Liberation Monday." (Incidentally, one can see sans contradiction, that a large part of state military spending the last 25 years or so, is to deal with these periods of rioting etc. The last and real enemy of a state is its own people, after all).

There is, of course, more than enough food and calories available on the planet for everyone's requirements. Tired Malthusian arguments, often dredged up by the very same people who laugh at Marxism for being 'out of date', are never more starkly revealed as pure ideology than in times of crisis. For the economic world is entering a period of crisis. By definition 'crisis' means a (biological) system will either die or survive the tumultuous effects it is undergoing. The choice of death is as stark. Do you wish for the death of hundreds of thousands by slow starvation or the death of the system that produces hunger on such an industrial scale. After 25 years of the neo-liberal 'experiment', its success can be measured in the size of the make shift graves used to dispose of the wizened cadavers. For how else to think of this outcome as one that it intended all along?